Monique Tschofen receives international recognition for contributions to 20th-century literature and film
Monique Tschofen, professor in the Department of English, has garnered international attention for her boundary-pushing contributions to digital, visual, and environmental storytelling. Known for her work on 20th-century literature and film, digital culture, and visual culture, Tschofen is also a co-founder of the Decameron Collective (external link) , an interdisciplinary group of nine women scholars and artists from six Canadian universities.
Monique Tschofen’s work explores new frontiers in storytelling, earning international recognition for its innovation across literature, art, and digital media.
The collective's SSHRC-funded research-creation projects, Decameron 2.0 (2022, WebGL), Memory Eternal (2023, VR), Deformances (2024), and Metamorphoses: Love Letters to Possible Futures (2025, AR), have been exhibited internationally in Japan, Portugal, Italy, the United States, and Canada. These works have received multiple awards and have been recognized for their innovative approaches to form, medium, and storytelling.
During her 2024–2025 sabbatical, while serving as a Visiting Senior Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, Tschofen created her first film, Aquaphoria (external link) . Aquaphoria (before the waters rise), a poetic, environmental documentary, explores the question of how to passionately love the world in the face of an increasingly severe ecological crisis. It was named Best Environmental Film at the Montreal Women Film Festival (external link) (May 2025), was nominated for the LA Independent Women Film Awards, and received Honourable Mention at the Experimental Forum in Los Angeles. Her ongoing collaborations with artist Jolene Armstrong, Solastalgia (2025) and Fire and Water (2025), continue to explore the emotional dimensions of climate change and environmental instability.
Happenings at the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference in July 2025. Photo credit Kari Maaren.
Tschofen’s most recent project, Happenings: A Tragico-Lyrical Philosophical Essay (external link) , marks a new phase in her creative scholarship. In contrast to the euphoric and mournful tone of Aquaphoria, this work adopts a more sombre and reflective voice. Built using the Scalar publishing platform, she employs with her classes designed by the University of Southern California, the work revisits the history of literature and art through the lens of sexual assault. Combining text, image, and sound, including a haunting soundscape drawn from BBC archival recordings of moths chewing, the project is framed as an “essai” in the Montaignian sense: a searching, experimental attempt to give form to traumatic experience.
This summer, Happenings was shortlisted for both the Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize and the Social Good Prize at the UK’s New Media Writing Prize (external link) (June 2025). At the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference, hosted this year by York University and the University of Waterloo, the project was awarded Runner Up for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (external link) in July 2025. The award is named after American author Robert Coover, a pioneer in the field of electronic and experimental literature.
“I’m so thrilled by these international honours,” says Tschofen. “I came to art making very late in life, and tend to make genre-defying works. To see juries not only pay close attention but also understand and appreciate my works means I can encourage my students to say what they need to say in whatever way they need to say it.”
Tschofen’s recent international recognition celebrates a remarkable body of creative scholarship and underscores the growing importance of interdisciplinary approaches in literature, film, and digital media.